The Weekend the Music Died

“Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury” (Orange County Museum of Art: Prestel Publishing, 2008).

This weekend marks the day the music died. I’ve been reading Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, And Culture at Midcentury, edited by Elizabeth Armstrong and issued by the Orange County Museum of Art (Prestel Publishing) in 2008. It is a kind of work that explores the genesis (or amplification) of “cool” from southern California, and this raises a chicken or the egg question: in the post-WWII world, did southern California create “cool,” or did southern California appropriate cool, embrace it, and then turn it up to — in the words of Spinal Tap — eleven?

It’s not cool to talk about cool, and that is a primary working definition of cool from the post-WWII world (captured in many ways by Anatole Broyard’s 1948 essay, “Portrait of the Hipster”). In Armstrong’s words, cool is “an attitude that eludes those who try too hard to achieve it.” (Armstrong, 2008: 1) In the essay “Cold War Cool” by Thomas Hine (also in this work), he says “Those who speak and write most about it — including most of those quoted in this essay — don’t have it. Truly cool people know enough to keep their mouths shut. (Nevertheless, I shall proceed.)” (Hine, 2008: 194) So shall I.